“Besides hare tracks, the vast snowy plain is crossed by lynx tracks, hole after hole, strung neatly on a drawn-out thread. A lynx walks like a cat, one paw in front of the other, covering many miles a night, as people maintain.
“They set snares for them, ‘sloptsy,’ as they call them here. Instead of lynxes, poor hares fall into the traps, and are taken out frozen stiff and half covered with snow.
“At first, in spring and summer, it was very hard. We were exhausted. Now, in the winter evenings, we rest. We gather around the lamp, thanks to Anfim, who provides us with kerosene. The women sew or knit, I or Alexander Alexandrovich reads aloud. The stove is burning, I, as the long-recognized stoker, keep an eye on it, so as to close the damper in time and not lose any heat. If a smoldering log hampers the heating, I take it out all smoky, run outside with it, and throw it far off into the snow. Scattering sparks, it flies through the air like a burning torch, lighting up the edge of the black, sleeping park with its white quadrangles of lawn, lands in a snowdrift, hisses, and goes out.
“We endlessly reread War and Peace, Evgeny Onegin and all the poems, we read The Red and the Black by Stendhal, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and the short stories of Kleist.”
3
Closer to spring, the doctor wrote:
“I think Tonya is expecting. I told her so. She does not share my supposition, but I am sure of it. Until more unquestionable signs appear, I cannot be deceived by the preceding, less perceptible ones.
“A woman’s face changes. It cannot be said that she loses her good looks. But her appearance, which before was entirely under her supervision, now escapes her control. She is at the disposal of the future, which will come out of her and is no longer her. This escape of her appearance from under her surveillance wears a look of physical perplexity, in which her face becomes dull, her skin more coarse, and her eyes begin to shine differently, not as she would like, as if she could not manage it all and let it go.
“Tonya and I have never had any distance from each other. But this year of work has brought us closer still. I’ve noticed how efficient, strong, and untiring she is, how quick-witted in lining up tasks, so that in moving from one to the other she loses as little time as possible.
“It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate, that this dogma concerning the Mother of God expresses the general idea of motherhood.
“On every woman giving birth there lies the same reflection of solitude, of being abandoned, left to her own resources. The man is excluded from things to such a degree now, at this most essential of moments, that it is as if he had never been there and everything had fallen from the sky.
“A woman herself brings her progeny into the world, herself retires with him into the background of existence, where it is more quiet and where she can put the cradle without fear. She herself, in silent humility, nurses him and rears him.
“People ask the Mother of God: ‘Pray fervently to your Son and your God!’ They put fragments of a psalm into her mouth: ‘And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.’ She says this about her infant, he will exalt her (‘For he who is mighty has done great things for me’), he is her glory.3 Every woman can say the same. Her god is in her child. Mothers of great people should be familiar with that feeling. But decidedly all mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”
4
“We endlessly reread Evgeny Onegin and the poems. Anfim was here yesterday and brought presents. We regale ourselves, we have light. Endless conversations about art.
“My long-standing thought that art is not the name of a category or sphere that embraces a vast multitude of notions and ramified phenomena, but, on the contrary, is something narrow and concentrated, the designation of a principle that enters into the composition of an artistic work, the name of the force applied or the truth worked out in it. And to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a mysterious and hidden part of content. To me it is clear as day, I feel it with my every fiber, but how express and formulate this thought?
“Works speak through many things: themes, situations, plots, heroes. But most of all they speak through the art contained in them. The presence of art in the pages of Crime and Punishment is more astounding than Raskolnikov’s crime.
“Primitive art, Egyptian, Greek, our own, is surely one and the same art in the course of the millennia and always remains in the singular. It is some thought, some assertion about life, which, in its all-embracing breadth, cannot be broken down into separate words, and when a grain of that force enters into the composition of some more complex mixture, this admixture of art outweighs the significance of all the rest and turns out to be the essence, the soul, and the foundation of what is depicted.”
5
“A slight cold, a cough, and probably a small fever. All day I’ve been catching my breath somewhere at the level of the throat, as if there is a lump there. Things are bad for me. It’s the aorta. The first warnings of heredity from my poor mama’s side, a lifelong story of heart ailment. Can it be true? So early? In that case, I’m not long for this world.
“It is a bit fumy in the room. Smells of ironing. Someone’s ironing and keeps adding hot, flaming coals from the still-burning stove to the coal iron, which clacks its lid like teeth. It reminds me of something. I can’t remember what. A sick man’s forgetfulness.
“Overjoyed that Anfim brought some nut-oil soap, they flew into a general laundering, and Shurochka hasn’t been looked after for two days. When I write, he gets under the table, sits on the crossbar between the legs, and, imitating Anfim, who takes him for a sleigh ride each time he comes, pretends that he’s also driving me in a sledge.
“When I get better, I must go to town to read up on the ethnography of the region and its history. I’m assured there is an excellent town library, put together from several rich donations. I want to write. I must hurry. Before I turn around, spring will be here. Then there will be no bothering with reading and writing.
“My headache keeps getting worse. I didn’t sleep well. I had a confused dream, one of those that you forget on the spot when you wake up. The dream left my head, in my consciousness there remained only the cause of my waking up. I was awakened by a woman’s voice, which I heard in my sleep, which in my sleep resounded in the air. I remembered its sound and, reproducing it in my memory, mentally went through all the women I know, searching for which of them might be the owner of that chesty, moist voice, soft from heaviness. It did not belong to any. I thought that my excessive habituation to Tonya might stand between us and dull my hearing in relation to her. I tried to forget she was my wife and moved her image further off, to a distance sufficient for clarifying the truth. No, it was not her voice either. So it remained unclarified.
“Incidentally, about dreams. It is an accepted notion that we tend to dream at night of something that has strongly impressed us in the daytime, when we were awake. My observations are the opposite.
“I’ve noticed more than once that it is precisely things we have barely noticed in the daytime, thoughts not brought to clarity, words spoken without feeling and left without attention, that return at night clothed in flesh and blood, and become the subjects of dreams, as if in compensation for our neglect of them in the daytime.”